A coup against the people

Can the establishment stop No Deal? Is Greta Thunberg being exploited? Why has the ASA banned adverts with ‘gender stereotypes’? Brendan O’Neill, Tim Black and Fraser Myers discuss all this and more on this week’s spiked podcast.

Picture by: Getty.

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Chis Marley

18th August 2019 at 11:56 am

Hey Boris…don`t forget to banish to Brussels all those moppets sucking on the breast of the breast of the British taxpayer. There may be worse places to die in exile but I cant think of one. Ok maybe Swansea but when you are born in Neath its hard to judge….definitely Brussels. They can starve to death on the steps of the European parliament like an Elizabethan sailor waiting on his pay…the sad fact being those sailors didn’t deserve that fate…..whereas the devolution donkeys….I AM sure a European Commissioner or will drop them a penny as they step over the trash…..otherwise they will have to face the wrath of????….no one…they work for the EU

Winston Stanley

18th August 2019 at 11:31 pm

“whereas the devolution donkeys… they will have to face the wrath of????”

You and whose army?

Hana Jinks

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18th August 2019 at 10:14 am

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Winston Stanley

18th August 2019 at 7:36 am

“That Gretta, that Noah, that Jonah, that Fishgirl of men, tossed hither and thither for 40 days and nights as the waters of our sins swelled from out of the abyss… “

Winston Stanley

Hana Jinks

Winston Stanley

19th August 2019 at 4:33 am

Hanah, btw. I hope that you did not take that as an insult of punk / rock, I actually like those genres, it was a serious joke about a name for a punk / rock band and the schtick that could do with their crowd. There can be a lot of unintended ambiguity to the written word.

Winston Stanley

Hana Jinks

Winston Stanley

18th August 2019 at 2:59 am

I would argue in favour of a proroguement of parliament.

It would be one thing to say that a proroguement would somehow be “wrong”, for parliamentary reasons (which is debatable), and quite another to say that the situation does not nevertheless justify it. It would be an odd sort of dogmatic moralist who insisted that the means never justify the end however grave. That being so, it is pragmatically irrelevant whether a proroguement would be “wrong”, the question is whether the danger posed to Brexit, and to democracy in Britain, is grave enough to justify a proroguement. I would say that it is. Brexit must get over the line and if that practically entails proroguement then so be it.

Moreover, as the team make clear, this is supposed to be a democracy, and parliament, and the state generally, has zero authority over the demos. MPs are there solely to represent our democratic verdicts. MPs seem to think that democracy amounts to choice between two parties with their own manifestoes who then get to do whatever they want and regardless of what the demos wants. That is not a democracy, it is two-party unrepresentative state. Clearly the British parliamentary set up is wholly inadequate and unacceptable. We need a radical reformation to democratise politics in Britain and to give the demos more direct and real control over our own society.

That being so, and especially as MPs so badly conceive their job and are so directly set against the democratic verdict of the demos about Brexit, the largest majoritarian vote in our history, it is wholly appropriate to bypass the parliament with a proroguement. Indeed that is urgent. What matters here is that the will of the demos is done and is seen to be done. Parliament has stood in the way of democracy, therefore parliament must be prorogued. It is a secondary consideration whether it is normal and theoretically sound practice to prorogue (which I would argue, it is), and indeed the parliamentary system is inadequate and unacceptable so obviously it is not to be treated as inviolate or sacrosanct.

Indeed, a proroguement would be the wake up call, exactly the bucket of cold water in the face that parliament and its MPs need, to get the message through to them that the demos is indeed sovereign, and that Britain has entered a new climate in which the will of the demos is sacrosanct and not the will and the machinations of parliament. That would be a classy and the best of Brexits, in accord with the new democratic spirit and practice that Brexit promises to unleash on this land. Let us continue as we intend to go on. We fully intend to let MPs know who is the boss in this democracy and that they get their marching orders if we are discontent. A proroguement would be a beautiful and elegant object lesson that our will rules, that the demos rules this country and not parliamentarians, and that our will will be done come what may. Our will is sovereign and sacrosanct, not parliament, its procedures or its machinations. Let parliament be prorogued and let democracy be done.

Hana Jinks

18th August 2019 at 11:54 am

They’re controlled, Winston.

Hana Jinks

18th August 2019 at 12:02 pm

There is a story on my google news feed from an outfit called crikey, and it’s largely critical of puked. I joined up and commented on how it’s a load of commies, but the forum can be fun to troll. You’d be surprised how quickly the comment was deleted. I believe that it’s how they promote themselves. You see so much bitching from the orifice at other leftists.

Hana Jinks

20th August 2019 at 6:45 am

What’s the operative word there, tho? Point taken, but is there anyone else?

Hana Jinks

Chis Marley

17th August 2019 at 3:26 pm

Only leaders heads adorn Traitors Gate.
This is not France
Do not treat us like peasants.
Following the restoration it was explicit that a British monarch cannot be held to be legitimate without convoking Parliament.
And although Parliament could not convoke itself it held the right to depose an unjust King or Queen.
So when elected members of parliament feign to` outlaw hate` (us) while they` peddle treason` (them)
I say the only protection left to the British Subjects democratic right to choose the Government of their choice could well be Queen Elizabeth II.
I am of the opinion that if the Queen does not dismiss this Parliament and allow her Prime Minister to take this country out of the E.U this sordid Parliament is quite likely planning on dismissing our Queen first. In fact the sordid little coups they are planning will require it.
In fact I will state here I believe we are finally seeing what the EU had planned for the United Kingdom and may
I respectfully suggest to Her Majesty that our quisling political class have known about this all along. How does one explain the brazen spleen of this Parliment and the smug intransience of the EU and its revolving little faceless Napoleons.
If these lizards are prepared to hazard a civil war and the destruction of our democracy what right have they to rule ?
Dismiss this House Mam`.
And Mr Johnson you were asked to lead this country. Sir will you please progrogue these rats NOW….GET US OUT

Jim Lawrie

17th August 2019 at 10:30 am

Regardless of the PR photos relayed back, no captain would entrust to someone like her any responsibility in that environment, because she lacks the mental capacity to understand her part in a team. The cost in man hours and resources in shipping her there and back is horrendous, as well as all the packaging and processing of the food. Imagine if we all defecated raw into the sea.
The extent to which she is being abused would be made clear if the event envisaged by Arron Banks came to pass and the vessel was overwhelmed. She would go from passenger to burden.

I wonder how her and her father travelled from Stockholm to Plymouth, and the other crew from the four corners?

Has they left from Stockholm the purity of the journey would have been contaminated by the need to travel through the Baltic under a motorised power. Possibly the ignominy, or should it be the honesty, of being towed. Ditto on their arrival.

The time they have set to arrive there, 2 weeks, is painfully slow for that kind of craft, and no doubt we will all be expected to coo in awe at their great achievement in arriving ahead of schedule. If they arrive.

Christopher Tyson

16th August 2019 at 6:33 pm

Talking of Tony Benn, it was Benn who said that blaming Marx for Stalinist Russia was like blaming Jesus for the Spanish inquisition. We can take things further blaming Nietzsche for Nazism. History is being re-awakened but what are the dividing lines. Hume is the great British philosopher, Betrand Russel quipped that psychiatric wards are filled with people who have tried to refute Hume. But like the other greats Hume’s legacy is mixed. I can help thinking that today’s Blairite ‘what works’ pragmatism, or our elites belief in their own common sense and their anti-intellectualism and disdain for ideas owes something to Hume. Hume’s philosophy suited and emerging imperial power, a get up and go spirit, a drive to do things and conquer, no time to spend in idle contemplation. It is the losers who are attracted to rationalism, the plotters, the dispossessed. So we have empiricism vs rationalism. We also have phenomenology vs behaviourism, again behaviourism is the psychology/ideology of the winners, standing above society and classifying others. Phenomenology is the psychology of the lone individual. Which brings us to anti-Semitism, it seems to me that there is in Jewish thought something existential and tentatively I would look at the relationship between Husserl his usurper Heidegger, Husserl of Jewish origin, Heidegger whose Nazism is now widely known, whether he was a true believer or an opportunist does not matter for what I’m discussing here. So in conclusion, people are looking for the key divide in society today, elites vs the masses, roundheads we cavaliers, Remainers we Brexiteers, somewhere and anywhere, and I just want to throw in rationalists vs empiricists. Rationalism begins with the individual, the demise of class politics led to atomised individual, we are looking for connections and belonging. The empiricists have social power and financial security, there anxiety is for what may happen, rationalist are looking to save their souls, some may find this ironic but Descartes was a devout Catholic, and Kierkegaard was also a religious writer and I would argue a rationalist. The empiricist Hume was of course an atheist, although he did apparently hint at some ambivalence maybe on his death bed, but then ambivalence was his thing, like our current leaders, we don’t really know what they stand for.

Winston Stanley

18th August 2019 at 4:17 am

Interesting stuff, and I hope that I will not step on your toes. I had little idea quite how Humean my position is until I recently read the encyclopaedia article about him. It was almost embarrassing to see the likeness. Anyway, my question would be, do you see any parallel between the empiricist/ rationalist dichotomy and that between Marxism, as historical materialism, and Utopianism as the project to radically alter society on the basis of ideas?

I would suggest that perhaps society transitions epochally, from one mode of production to another, in a manner akin to the “pragmatic, empirical” emphasis and that ideas are secondary and are reflective of the economic base in its historical development. Dominant ideas reflect the realities of the society in its mode of material organisation. Socialist ideas would thus be “empirical” or pragmatic in a socialist order, just as capitalist ideas are pragmatic within capitalist society. However, ideas play a secondary, and yet important, reformist role in the tweaking of the social order, and that improves the lot of the masses, and yet the ideas still ultimately reflect and cement the economic base. So for me, it is not reality vs ideas, so much as an emphasis as to what is primary and of determining import.

No doubt I have simplified empiricism/ rationalism there and I may have misread your gist. I think that Marx and Hume sit quite comfortably together and I wanted to suggest that. Social “convention” is important in the regulation of social behaviour for Hume, and there is no “moral truth”, and Marx makes the same points in his own way with the base/ superstructure dichotomy. There is an almost “empirical, pragmatic” relationship between social reality in its material basis and moral and political ideas for Marx. And what is “pragmatic” ultimately depends on the stage of society in its material development, there is no eternal truth about what is “pragmatic”, it has a real, changing and “empirical” basis.

Btw. “Sentiment” is the key motivator for Hume, so he has a pronounced subjective side. Marx has his “revolutionary class consciousness”, and I actually think that he overemphasised the role of the subjective agitator in revolutionary transition. Capitalism has to run its course, but I wont repeat all that stuff again right now. Thanks.

(This is the encyclopaedia article on the moral and political philosophy of Hume if anyone reading would like a gander.)